A private auditing firm is expected to release findings on Monday that may explain why the Lyndhurst school district has a nearly $5 million deficit.

The deficit was revealed last January, when the former superintendent of schools said failure to issue the proper approval for expenditures and faulty bookkeeping were to blame for the shortfall, originally thought to be $1.1 million.

A review of five years' worth of district documents by NorthJersey.com and the USA TODAY NETWORK New Jersey shows that the district's business office accepted invoices from vendors for work that had already been completed, but which had not been authorized through proper procedures. The documents were acquired through a public records request.

Purchase orders, invoices and payment vouchers for plumbing and electrical work between the district and two local contractors were examined and showed that invoices seeking payment for completed work preceded purchase orders.

The district, the documents show, regularly accepted invoices for electrical and plumbing work completed by contractors throughout district schools before purchase orders for the repairs were done.

The proper procedure calls for purchase orders to be filed and approved by the district before any work can be completed, said former Superintendent Shauna DeMarco. The purchase orders also set a general price for the work.

Lyndhurst High School(Photo: Meghan Grant)

One year ago, DeMarco attributed the financial woes to a mistake with purchase orders and the "re-classification" of funds. She said district administratorstook costs absorbed in one year and transferred them to the another year's budget.

"The re-classification caused significant overspending in terms of quantities and amounts," DeMarco said in a statement last January.

The cause of the failure to issue purchase orders was never explained, nor were specifics as to what expenditures were missing approved orders.

"Business administrators in public schools are to have purchase orders in place prior to services being rendered," DeMarco wrote in an email in November. "Payments should be remitted following board approval [...] via resolution."

But this was not the case. Multiple bills were commingled on retroactive purchase orders that include such specific information as corresponding invoice numbers.

Of more than 60 invoices submitted by one contractor between 2015 and 2016, two purchase orders for the same period retroactively approved 12 individual invoices. Another purchase order retroactively approved nine.

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"They clearly took the bill and used it to create the purchase order," said Bill Morrison, a forensic accountant with WithumSmith+Brown, as he looked over invoices and orders from multiple school years.

"A purchase order should be more general," he said, referring to orders that contained nearly narrative explanations of repairs, such as one line item written in the past tense: "Roosevelt School — Removed existing slop sink and faucet in boiler room and installed new sink and faucet with all necessary piping."

In another case, a plumber who was approved by a Board of Education resolution for $1,611 of work during the 2016-17 school year received $18,764 in payment.

Documents showed that close to $15,000 of those repairs were completed after September 2017 and through spring 2018. But those payments are included on a check registry for the 2016-17 school year.

The district has been undergoing a financial audit by the firm Lerch, Vinci and Higgins. Its auditor, Jeffrey Bliss, will deliver his report at a public meeting of the Board of Education on Monday night. This presentation was offered to the board’s finance committee last week, but officials said they could not comment on Bliss' findings until his report was made public.

Although Bliss was hired by school officials, the state Department of Education assigned a financial monitor to the district after the deficit was first announced in January 2018.

That monitor, Tom Egan, dropped a bombshell on the Township Commission last week, stating that a 2016 school renovation project was so poorly handled that the district bonded about $5 million dollars less than the project would cost, calling the process a "disaster."

Asked whether Bliss found the same problematic bookkeeping practices, Egan said he could not comment until after Monday's presentation. Scott Bisig, the district business administrator, said the same thing.

Bliss and the district's former business administrator, David DiPisa, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. DiPisa left Lyndhurst for a similar position within the Bergenfield district in August 2017, before the deficit was made public.